Donald Trump, in vintage form, emerged victorious from ABC’s Lion’s Den

President Trump gave a classic debate performance last night, pitting himself against not only Kamala Harris but also ABC’s two debate observers, David Muir and Linsey Davis, whose hostile questioning and fact-checking focused primarily, if not exclusively, on the 45^and President. The 45th president delivered a masterclass in polemics to more than 50 million viewers — and fair-minded commentators called it one of the president’s best.

He repeatedly addressed the issues that matter to voters this election season, most notably the catastrophic Kamala border crisis, which has allowed tens of millions of criminal invaders into the country with impunity, using deadly drugs like fentanyl and unparalleled barbarity, including drug cartels and human trafficking, unparalleled in American history.

The tone of the president’s remarks and style were befitting the seriousness and extraordinarily high stakes of this election cycle: fierce but reserved, intense but thoughtful, serious but level-headed. In sharp contrast, Kamala Harris reeked of youth and weakness throughout, nervously trying to cackle her way out of uncomfortable situations to address problems for which she is largely responsible. These include the outbreak of war in Ukraine, with Vladimir Putin sending troops into Eastern Europe just three days after she was tasked by Joe Biden with brokering peace in the region.

This was a response to Putin’s sense of her weakness, a point that President Trump emphasized, and that he also noted just months before Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. The catastrophic withdrawal directly killed 13 American troops and left millions of dollars of equipment behind for dangerous terrorists to emerge—the biggest foreign policy blunder in living memory.

Furthermore, the president delivered another blow when he lambasted Kamala’s mismanagement of the border when she was appointed the Biden administration’s “border czar.” The president minced no words when he declared, “(The migrants) are eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” referring to an influx of recent Haitian arrivals in Springfield, Ohio, who have been reported — and confirmed by a police report, despite the gaslighting of ABC’s errant “fact-checkers” — to be eating American pets, and bringing Third World barbarism and uncivilized practices to these shores.

Speaking of third-world barbarism, the president delivered another blow to Biden and Harris when he attacked their economic performance, which has resulted in record inflation, labor market sabotage, and the slowest growth in both the stock market and GDP since the Great Recession. The damning jobs report recently released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the Biden-Harris administration created some 1.2 million jobs in the past quarter, but incredibly, those jobs were exclusively for foreign workers—many of whom are here illegally. Meanwhile, American-born citizens have lost 1.3 million jobs—an unmitigated disaster.

Based on these statistics, the president held Kamala’s feet to the fire. “Kamalanomics is killing the American Economy!” the president declared. “When I left office, I gave Kamala a booming economy. Mortgage rates were around 2%. Gasoline was $1.87 a gallon. Incomes were going up. Kamala blew it all up.” All true.

President Trump then succinctly summarized how disastrous the Biden-Harris administration’s policies have been for the economy: “If she becomes president, this country has no chance of success. Not just success, we’re going to end up like Venezuela on steroids.”

Moreover, President Trump did an excellent job of articulating that Kamala Harris’s policies are dangerously liberal: she is a die-hard Marxist. He skillfully dispelled any doubts about her radical beliefs by outlining the origins of her extremist philosophy: “She’s a Marxist, everybody knows that, her father is a Marxist professor of economics, he taught her well.” In this sentence, he was referring to Kamala’s father, Donald Harris, a longtime professor of economics at Stanford, a specialist in Marxist economic theory—who, through her daughter, has demonstrated the disastrous practical implications of such theories through the policies Kamala and Biden have implemented over the past three and a half years.

These policies include price controls, higher taxes, and benefits for illegal aliens. They also include her radical plans to socialize medicine and eradicate private insurance; introduce central bank digital currencies, copying the CCP’s system for assigning social credit scores; and phase out fracking, oil, and gas in pursuit of crippling electric vehicle mandates, setting the United States on a path to serfdom.

The president’s closing statement may have been his knockout punch. He asked a very simple question: Why has Kamala Harris, who has served as Biden’s vice president for the past three and a half years, failed to deliver on a single one of the promises she made on the debate stage?

“They’ve had three and a half years to fix the border,” President Trump said, “three and a half years to create jobs — and all the things we talked about. Why hasn’t they done it?”

It was that last line that will stick in the minds of the 50 million viewers who tuned in last night. And it was observed in a post-debate poll: When Newsmax was asked who won that night, they found that 93% of the audience believed President Trump won, compared to just 6% for Harris. Even C SPAN, a neutral network, found that 83% of the audience believed the 45^and The president had won that evening’s debate, while the vice president received only 17% of the vote.

Among CNN’s audience, when asked who would do a better job of handling the economy, President Trump’s numbers improved after the debate. At the start of the evening, 53% of CNN’s left-leaning audience thought President Trump would do a better job of handling the economy, compared to 37% for Harris. After the debate, President Trump’s numbers rose to 55%, and Harris’s numbers fell accordingly to 33%.

American voters are smart enough to see through the bullshit. That’s why Harris immediately begged President Trump for a second chance to debate him when he wrapped up the post-debate interviews. Among Pennsylvania voters, President Trump’s comments resonated particularly well. His points about saving fracking and mass deportations resonate with this largely blue-collar audience, which—like much of the Rustbelt region—has been hit particularly hard by globalist policies that have outsourced their manufacturing jobs to China, Mexico, and India and hollowed out their culture with mass immigration at home.

As a globalist, Kamala Harris herself is the mouthpiece of Washington’s failed ruling class—which includes Dick Cheney, the chief architect of the disastrous Iraq war, whose endorsement she bizarrely welcomed to the stage. In doing so, she has emerged as the establishment candidate, embodying the same ruling class that has brought endless wars and untold economic ruin to this country for decades.

President Trump’s conscious effort last night to appeal to the voters who have been most harmed by destructive neoliberal and globalist policies was particularly brilliant—because it will be states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin that will ultimately decide this election, just as they did for him in 2016. These voters are naturally drawn to the president’s plans to close the border and put America’s interests first, as well as his incendiary, no-holds-barred rhetoric that has endeared him to hundreds of millions of Americans, who to this day turn out in their tens of thousands to his rallies wherever he goes.

With that call, the president had a great success. He looked like the classic Donald Trump of 2016, who broke through the blue wall and shocked the political world by defeating Hillary Clinton, the face of the Washington swamp, with a very simple but powerful message: Make America Great Again.

After last night, he seems ready to do it again.

Paul Ingrassia is an attorney; director of communications for the NCLU; a two-time Claremont Fellow; and serves on the board of advisors of the New York Young Republican Club and the Italian American Civil Rights League. He writes a widely read Substack that is regularly posted to Truth Social by President Trump. Follow him on X @PaulIngrassiaSubstack, Truth Social, Instagram and Rumble.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.